While Dean was running one of our webinars on the morning I wrote this post, I decided to work in one of the nearby cafes. As I came in, a beautiful little girl wearing a flower in her hair and a sparkly unicorn t-shirt with pink shorts ran up to the counter. She tried to peer over it, failed, and then looked at her parents, who were sitting just a few tables away.

She started to run back in frustration because no one at the counter had noticed her. (She was too short.) But I was nearby and I said, “Did you want something? I’ll let them know.” She blurted something about “to-go” and “pizza” and I said, “Just give me a second.”

I leaned over the counter, and said to the guy who was making a smoothie not a foot from me, “A little person would like your help.”

He looked over, saw her, and smiled. Then he started to help her, while handing me a cup for my ice tea. I went to the beverage counter, got my ice tea, and as I turned around, she was back at the table, with her parents, and they were praising her.

“See?” her mom was saying to her. “It’s okay to be scared of trying something, but it’s good to try anyway.”

“You did great, honey,” her dad added. “You were afraid, but you did it anyway. Great job!”

A lot of you raised really good questions: should you go in already branded? What should you prepare before you go? Is the fair set up for people who are differently abled? And so on.

Great questions all, and with the exception of the last one, I can’t answer them yet. (The last one will probably depend on the site and the country where the fairs are held. Here in Las Vegas, the convention center at Mandalay Bay is set up for handicapped access, and not in the half-assed way I used to see in Oregon. Wide corridors, easy entrance into bathrooms with wide and useful handicap stalls, ramps everywhere, even more elevators, and on and on. But the upcoming rights fair in Shanghai? I have no idea.)

The response to the post was better than I thought. Indies are excited at the opportunity. The crickets from the traditional publishing camp doesn’t surprise me, although I did see two different threads on Facebook which made me shake my head. In my Facebook comment linking to the blog post, I urged traditional writers with agents to read the post. Of course, most didn’t, and one person (who started a thread herself) said she didn’t have to, since her agent handled all this stuff. Sigh, and double sigh, and triple sigh.

Learned helplessness isn’t just about being told over and over and over again that you can’t do something. Or that you’re not smart enough to do something.

It’s also about fear.

In truth, it’s mostly about fear.

Some of that fear is constantly reinforced, like the myth that writers are too featherbrained to handle business. That’s all over the culture, everywhere, being constantly repeated.

But a lot of it is about learning something new.

Hence, those parents and that little girl.

She ran up to the counter because she had been urged forward. She tried, scared and uncertain, and was about to run back when I spoke to her. She would have stayed if someone behind the counter had seen her too.

Her parents were spot-on. She had done a great job at overcoming her fear. She did something that she perceived as hard and succeeded. But the key was the try.

That’s the attitude that a lot of writers have lost.

We lose it in writing workshops, reworking a story to death to make it “perfect” before we send it to market.

We lose it to content “editors” who claim to know more about writing than we do, when really, if they did, they’d be making a living at writing, not “editing.”

We lose it to agents and other managers who assure us that they know how the business runs, when we could never learn it as well as they do.

Frankly, it’s easier to let someone else handle the difficult tasks that terrify us. It certainly would have been easier for that little girl to let her parents do what they have done for years—ask for a to-go container for their pizza. But they sent her to do it in a nearly empty restaurant so that she could start to learn to stand on her own.

It’s that attitude—learning to stand on your own no matter how hard it is—that I’m trying to teach writers in my weekly blogs. Sometimes, it gets confusing, I know. Particularly as I’m learning something.

Because I am not an all-knowing guru, I don’t pretend to have all the answers. What I have is a willingness to learn.

It’s also a willingness to try something and fail.

And it’s a willingness to put myself in situations that make me uncomfortable. Or even terrify me.

Sometimes I use logic to help me. For example, the one thing that terrified me about living in Las Vegas was the heat. I grew up in the northern Midwest. I could deal with 60 below, but the idea of 115 scared the crap out of me.

I studied it and studied it and studied it, and then moved here. I learned that dry heat really is different from humid heat, but that the sun is both wonderful and makes things worse. Mostly, I cope just fine. Air-conditioning is my friend.

But every now and then, my powerful imagination hooks on the horrors of heat and what could go wrong. After a particularly long stretch of record heat, I found myself as scared as that little girl. And I sat myself down and had a mental talk with myself.

It started with a look at the population of the Vegas Valley, which is about 2.25 million. If 2.25 million people can live here, dealing with the summer heat, then I can too. I just have to learn the same skills they have already learned.

And I am.

You’ll note that I made a similar mention in last week’s licensing post. I wrote: All of those people who attended that expo here in Vegas learned the world of licensing one detail at a time.

None of us go into a new world knowing how to navigate that world. From the heat in Las Vegas to figuring out how to best license our writing to figuring out how to tell good stories in the first place, the new things are hard and scary and difficult in the beginning.

They get easier.

Of course, it would all be easier if someone told us where to stand and what to do and how to behave. It’s even easier if someone does all of this for us.

The problem with that, particularly in this vast world of writing and publishing, is that letting someone else do everything for us opens the door to theft and fraud and simple mismanagement.

The best way around all of that is to learn the skills yourself, then hire someone if you need to. Why? If you learn the skills first—even if you’re awful at them—you will know what the job entails. You will know the kind of person you need for that job.

Before that, you’ll only know what you can imagine. And your imagination might be wrong.

The other nifty thing about doing something for yourself first is that it will open up possibilities for you. You might not be able to, say, work all the controls on a major sound editing program, but you will have investigated them and learned that certain things were possible, things you didn’t even know existed.

That’s why I suggested that you attend a major licensing fair first. Before you go in with all systems go. Before you hire someone to go in for you. Before you figure out if you need to brand your stuff first or if you must do so later. Before you even figure out what you even want out of the licensing fair.

You need to know what’s possible. And what I see at a licensing fair might mean nothing to you. Your writing projects are different; your needs are different; and your interests are different.

That, by the way, is the problem with any kind of employee or representation. They might go by what “everyone” does, not by what you want. And if you’ve never attended a licensing fair, you won’t even know what’s possible, let alone what you want.

That goes for all aspects of the publishing business. When you hire someone with expertise and then you give them their head, they will do what they have always done, or what’s easier, or what everyone else does. They won’t do what you want.

And if you’re an indie, you might think outside the box. Or you might want to. But dang it, folks, you have to leave the box to know what’s possible outside of that box.

Because I had grown up in Northern Wisconsin, where a 90-degree day with 95% humidity was oppressive at best, I expected the heat in Las Vegas to be oppressive too. I took those Midwestern summer days of my memory and added 15 to 20 degrees. I figured if the heat there was oppressive, it would be damn near unlivable here.

But it’s not. Today’s humidity is 11%, even though the temperature is 103. And that makes all the difference. It’s not unlivable at all. In fact, after three months, I now find myself thinking that 75 is a little chilly. On the Oregon Coast, 75 would be stifling. In the Midwest, 75 is pleasant.

I know all that because I’ve experienced all three of those places in the heat. Because I have, I know which I prefer. I prefer the low humidity to high humidity. And I wouldn’t have expected the difference.

Learning a new world—particularly in your industry (or related industries)—is not just about learning the reality of those worlds. It’s also about knowing what’s possible.

Look at the picture at the top of the blog. That sticker was on the banana I ate for breakfast this morning. In 2016, someone came up with the idea to partner Dole products with Disney products. (I know this because I Googled it, afraid that I had missed a Dole/Disney buyout.)

The October 2016 press release, filled with all of those lovely cheery words that try to make us love both companies more, stated that Disney and Dole decided to market fresh foods to children. Rather than put an Incredibles character on a cereal box, Disney opted for healthy food. Or probably, since I don’t have kids and don’t pay attention to kids’ cereals, as well as putting those Incredibles characters on a cereal box.

The press release makes it sound like Dole and Disney are working to help all of humankind. And maybe they are. But this is a marketing ploy, open that caught my attention when it started with Star Wars bananas a year or so ago. I thought that was funny.

But now, after attending the licensing fair, I can see how this partnership came about. Someone saw the way that Dole (and Chiquita and all the other banana companies) branded their bananas. They put little stickers on the bananas. And someone—whether at Dole or Disney—wondered how much it would cost to put a little Disney advertising on those bananas. That person (or persons) came up with the concept, and then Disney licensed the characters to Dole for the ad campaign.

Both companies got good press (in 2016) about stopping childhood obesity and now Disney is getting noticeable advertising. (Kevin J. Anderson and I discussed this at the WMG Anthology workshop in 2017 when we both got a Star Wars branded banana with our breakfasts. We noticed. We discussed as consumers, not as writers or business people.)

When I was with my friend at the licensing fair, we spent about fifteen minutes in the Disney area of the licensing fair. Disney had rented space below the show floor—several ballrooms filled with space. My friend was trying to make an appointment with someone he had a connection with, but they kept missing each other.

There were hundreds of tables in that section of the fair, and most were in use. Then there was the room for the top-secret projects, one ballroom over, projects you needed an NDA for just to walk in the room. People came out of that ballroom looking stressed and frantic and hopeful.

The banana branding might have come out of one of those meetings. Or the advertising firm that worked for Disney or Dole might have come up with the idea on their own. Who knows? But the possibilities are there at those fairs.

You won’t just see keychains and mugs and t-shirts, but all kinds of other options as well. And if you have a creative off-the-wall brain (like most writers do) you’ll come up with a way to license your characters or world or books in a way you hadn’t thought of before you got to the fair.

If you mention that kind of thing to an agent who is “in charge” of your career, that person will discourage you. No one advertises on bananas, an agent would say. What good would it do you? What would we get out of it?

Those of you who have worked in corporations or big companies or with seriously overworked people know what those sentences are really about. They’re about someone who doesn’t have the time to investigate what writer Steve Perry calls a “wild hair idea.”

Ask a stupid question. Figure out if there’s a good way to partner with an out-of-the-box partner. You might be surprised at what you find.

One other thing from last week’s comments. A few of you wondered why a writer would want to go to a big licensing fair to have someone else license a bit of the content you’ve created when you do it yourself.

I get that. I do. I’m always advocating that writers do most of the work themselves.

However, you must continue to write. You can’t do everything. And if you’re spending your day shepherding your t-shirts and coffee mugs and banana stickers, handling your website, and fulfilling special orders on your signed autographed book copies, you’re not writing.

Make sure those licenses have limited terms, so if you hate what one of the licensing companies does with the product, you can move to a different company.

Here’s the cool thing about licensing. If someone else did a product, you can use it to market to the next company, with the statement that you want to improve on what the previous company did. Believe me, that works.

Yes, yes, yes, all of this is terrifying. It’s hard. It’s overwhelming.

And here’s the thing that’s hardest for writers: there is no perfect. No workshop will help you develop your business the way you want to. No content editor will oversee your business and tell you how to fix it to make it better. No agent has ever had any experience with running this kind of business, so any advice they give is irrelevant, particularly since most agents work at agencies and have never run a small business in their entire lives.

To explore new worlds like this, you have to be willing to make mistakes. You have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to ask stupid questions. You have to be willing to be that fish out of water, someone who has no idea what this world is, but you want to learn it.

And learn it you will. If you put your mind to it.

I’ll bet you have no memory of the first time you asked someone working in a restaurant to get you something. That little girl I saw this morning will probably not remember this incident when she’s my age. But her parents gave her the kind of grounding that you need to give yourself in a new world.

You get points for showing up. You get points for trying.

And if you decide that working within that world is for you, you might actually make additional income on your already-written projects, just because you were willing to try.

For me, that kind of analysis makes learning the vast world of global licensing worth my time. For some of you, that might not be what you want at all.

It’s okay. As I say to my students, you are responsible for your own career. For its successes, its failures, and for the vision that guides it.

I do hope you join me outside the box. There are nifty cool worlds out here, waiting to be explored. And I’m heading off to explore them. One little piece at a time.

I find learning fun. In fact, if I’m not learning, I feel like I’m dying a little. Some people find learning intimidating. I get that. But learning is essential to any small business owners, and as I’ve said a thousand times in these business blogs, writers are small business owners.

Part of my small business are these nonfiction posts. Unlike many other areas of my writing, these posts are directly reader supported. (As opposed to supported through book sales or something.)

The support happens in a variety of ways from comments to shares to sending me links on topics I might have missed.

There’s also financial support, which makes me beholden to my readers and no one else.

If you liked this post, and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.

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9 responses to “Business Musings: Outside The Box”

The Tiki-Tiki Room (all those mechanical birds singing etc.) is actually sponsored by Dole. But some people think outside the box–Shrek sponsored onions! There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about how well it worked. Apparently lots of small children wanted to be strong like Shrek and urged their moms to buy onions.

This article is brimming with goodness (much like those Dole bananas–buy a couple more!).

After seeing positive results, one of the shortcuts I’ve tried to regularly put into practice is to catch myself instinctively resisting something, and then just jumping in to the fray. There’s rarely anything we engage in on a daily basis that we can’t easily disengage from at some point in time (Jeff Bezos refers to this type of decision as a type-2 decision). I’ve found that a large percentage of the time, that gut reaction is a simple fear of the unknown…and the best way to get rid of that fear is to make the unknown known.

Showing up and trying are critical components to learning, and your heat analogy is spot on. Dealing with the heat gets easier the longer you do it. This is my eighth summer in Phoenix, and it’s barely bothering me this year. That first summer though . . . I felt like I was about to spontaneously combust every time I went outside. But along with learning new behaviors, your body physically adapts to deal with extreme heat. I just don’t struggle with it like I used to. Triple digits in the forecast used to make me panic. Now I don’t even feel mildly bothered until 110 or so. Which is a lot like learning a big new intimidating thing like licensing. You adapt over time and one day realize you’re no longer overwhelmed. You might even be comfortable.

Kris, you may not know it but the Dole/Disney relationship has existed for a long time. Perhaps the most popular treat at Disney is the Dole Whip, which is pineapple soft serve. The parks have been serving it since 1986, but Dole and Disney have been working together since the ’60s. It’s another example of what you’re writing about in this post — one-time small steps that, over time, become big deals because you learn what is possible.

If you’re interested, here’s a 5 minute YouTube video about the history of the Disney Dole Whip:

Not mentioned specifically in the video: One thing that contributes to Dole Whip’s popularity is that, since it doesn’t have dairy in it, it’s one of Disney’s allergy-safe treats. I don’t know if that was planned from the beginning, but Disney food reviews do point that out.

Just for the record, the video says there’s a Dole Whip treat and a Dole Whip float. But you can also get a treat that’s Dole Whip on a slice of pineapple cake. And note that the Dole Whip is so popular that Dole had to license the Dole Whip to another company! I bet Dole only ever dreamed they’d make as much money off Disney as they do.

And again, that’s just what you were pointing out in this post, wasn’t it? 😉

AS Herbert wrote in Dune, “Fear is the mind killer.” In my former day job, I was a cognitive behavioural therapist; a kind of psychologist. The one thing I used to teach my clients was the Fight/Flight response, and how to cope with it. One part of that which is rarely discussed is the “freeze” response. Fight or flight people understand, freezing and doing nothing is actually far more common.

When one has to confront anything that causes fear these three responses mediate your behaviours. But one can learn to notice them and change what you do. However, it does require a willingness to change. Learning that is the hardest thing of all.

Yes, I agree, freeze is more common than people think – and then they blame themselves for being “lazy”, when in reality it’s basically a “safety program” keeping them from completing stories, marketing or doing other tasks. Just becoming aware of that concept can be a huge help, by ending the blame game. (Therapist here, as well, in RL. 😉 )

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